by Barbara Kyle
As they barreled straight for a cluster of priests at the open north door Honor shut her eyes again. She heard the priests flutter apart. She felt the sunlight hit her face, felt the horse tilt downwards as they catapulted down the steps. By the time she looked again they were crossing the churchyard and tucking through Little Gate, leaving the cathedral’s walled enclosure.
After that, the race east along Cheapside was easy going. The thoroughfare was crowded, but wide enough that the stallion could gallop. They turned south. Honor could see ahead the flags fluttering from the rooftops of London Bridge. Her heart pounded with hope. In minutes, with luck, they would be across, in Southwark. The boundary of London was fixed at the stone posts at the Southwark end of the bridge, and anyone escaping beyond the posts from the authority of the city could easily lose themselves in Southwark’s warren of alleys, cockpits and brothels. She glanced over her shoulder. She saw no closing pack, no Bastwick.
“You’ve done it!” she cried in Thornleigh’s ear. “We’ve lost them!”
Then, dead ahead, Bastwick shot out of a side street. But he was looking toward the bridge, apparently thinking they had passed him. Thornleigh blazed right by him. Honor looked back. Bastwick was whipping his mount after them, bent like galloping Death over the horse’s neck, his black robe streaming. His men poured out of the side street and followed him, Legge in front.
Honor pushed against Thornleigh as if to help force them up to the massive arched entrance of the bridge. It was so close! She could see the last of the rainwater dripping from the saw-toothed bottom of the raised portcullis. But Legge on his fast Arab was tearing up the gap between them. He was almost upon them.
Thornleigh’s stallion thundered onto the wooden timbers of the bridge. Light dimmed as they entered the tunnel-like space formed by the shops that crowded both sides, the upper stories almost touching. The air hummed with the rush of the river churning around the stone supports. An ox cart halfway across the bridge was slowly rumbling toward them.
Thornleigh slowed to zig-zag around pedestrians. Legge sped past them. Suddenly, ahead of them, the ox cart lumbered sideways. It stopped. The beast and wagon, turned in this way, effectively sealed off the bridge. Legge had done it; riding to the ox’s head, he had forced the cart into a blockade. Thornleigh had no choice but to haul the stallion to a stop.
Behind, at the bridge’s arch, Bastwick gave a signal. His horsemen fanned out, closing off the entrance. One of them galloped forward to join Legge. Seeing this array, the terrified driver of the ox cart leaped down and ran off toward Southwark. Two workmen on a scaffolding clambered down their ladder and bolted into a doorway, leaving the ladder quivering in their wake. Frightened pedestrians fled, and Bastwick’s men allowed them to squeeze out. Shop doors slammed.
In the emptied space between the ox cart and the attackers, Thornleigh and Honor were trapped. Bastwick’s three archers jumped from their horses and whipped the bows from their backs. They fixed their arrows. Bastwick pointed. “The woman,” he commanded.
Thornleigh let out a blood-curdling battle cry. Head bent, he kicked the horse and plunged straight for the archers. They stumbled backwards in surprise. Thornleigh immediately wheeled around and began to gallop back toward the ox cart. Honor knew he was going to try to jump the short gap of harness between the cart and the ox.
She clung fast. From behind, two arrows whizzed by her ear. One thudded into the cart’s side. She saw the cart loom up, felt the stallion tense for the jump. But before it could leave the ground there was a whack! as a third arrow stabbed into the horse’s rump. The horse staggered. Honor swayed, lost balance, and thudded to the ground. She scrambled to crawl free of the flailing hooves.
Thornleigh looked back at Honor, and in that moment the terrified stallion, blindly following Thornleigh’s original command, rallied and leapt. Thornleigh sailed over the harness gap and clattered onto the other side, safe.
Alone on the battlefield Honor reeled to her feet. Her skirt was ripped, her palms scraped and bloody. She looked back. The archers were fitting fresh arrows. In an act of sheer instinct, Honor flattened her bleeding hands over her belly to protect the life inside.
Thornleigh saw the gesture. There was agony in his eyes as he watched her standing helpless in the line of arrow fire while he fought to calm his panicked horse.
Legge, at the ox’s head, saw the gesture too. He scowled. “Why, the woman’s with child,” he said to the man beside him.
The man barely heard. “What?”
“Five babes I have, and don’t you think I’ve seen my Mary hug her swollen belly just like that?” He cursed. The poxy priest had said nab the woman, not murder her. They could easily have nabbed her in the night, but when he’d told Bastwick the couple’s plan to involve the Steelyard Germans, the priest had decided to wait and swoop down on all of them at once. “The priest’s a greedy fool,” he muttered.
Thornleigh had finally turned the stallion in a wide sweep, and was preparing to jump back across the cart harness to rescue Honor. He kicked the horse’s flanks. The hooves thudded in approach. The horse flew into the air just as the archers’ bows twanged again. The horse screamed as one shaft ripped into its chest, another into its throat. It dropped onto the harness, iron bolts flaying its skin, blood spurting. Thornleigh was thrown backwards to the ground, still separated from Honor by the cart.
Honor heard another arrow sing through the air. It ripped across her upper arm, stinging. Blood oozed, but the tip had only grazed her flesh.
“Christ,” Legge growled. “Murdering a pregnant woman’s not to my taste.”
Honor scrambled up onto the wagon-seat to get across. She stood in clear view of the archers.
“Lady!” Legge shouted. He was riding toward her. “Lady, take my horse,” he cried, and slipped from the saddle.
Honor looked at him, amazement in her eyes.
“Never fear,” Legge cried with a grin as he let go the horse, “I’m a good swimmer!”
The archers were running forward. Honor did not hesitate. She hiked up her skirts and sprang down onto the Arab. At last, both she and Thornleigh were on the far side of the cart. Legge, having sprinted past them halfway across the bridge, veered into a gap between buildings on the downstream side where the water was calm, and dove off.
Honor kicked the Arab toward Thornleigh. He was trying to stand, but his left ankle buckled under him, broken in his fall. She circled him and stretched out her hand for him. One of the archers had by this time made it up onto the wagon. He stood on the seat and drew his bow string.
Thornleigh was hobbling toward Honor when the arrow pierced his shoulder blade. He swiped back at it like a man scratching.
Bastwick cried to the archer, “Not him! The woman!”
At Bastwick’s command Thornleigh’s eyes flashed back to Honor with sudden understanding. He slapped the Arab’s rump. It bounded forward. “Over the bridge!” he shouted after her.
She hauled on the reins. “Not without you!” She was trying to turn, but the horse was used to a firmer hand and it scudded sideways, out of her control.
Thornleigh was limping to the workmen’s ladder on the upstream side of the bridge. Clumsy with his injured foot, and the arrow still quivering in his shoulder, he pulled himself up onto the scaffold and grabbed a carpenter’s mallet. Honor watched as he clawed his way from the scaffold up onto a narrow roof gable and straddled its ridge.
At that moment Bastwick on his horse plunged over the harness gap.
“Honor!” Thornleigh yelled. “Run! Now!” He hurled down the mallet at Bastwick. It struck Bastwick’s horse on the shoulder and the horse shied.
Bastwick pointed up to the roof in fury. “Get him!” he shouted.
The archers took aim at Thornleigh.
“Richard!”
He crouched on the roof tiles as their arrows flew. They missed him. They whipped out new arrows and trained them on him again.
“No!” Honor screamed.
> Wildly, she kicked the horse and lunged toward Bastwick. “Make them stop!” She skidded beside him. He snatched the Arab’s bridle. She saw the red flame of hate burning at the core of his black eyes. She fumbled for Thornleigh’s dagger at her belt, lifted it, and plunged it into Bastwick’s knee. He recoiled with a scream.
She looked up at the roof just as an archer snapped his bow string. The arrow plowed into Thornleigh’s thigh. His foot slipped on the roof slates, and he had to stand straighter to get a foothold. The second archer took aim. The bow string twanged. The arrow blazed, glinting sunlight, flashing feather colors. It plunged into Thornleigh’s eye. His hands flew to his bloody face. Bristling with three arrows he staggered backwards along the spine of the roof. Then he fell. Honor’s heart stopped. In a sliver of blue daylight between walls she saw his body plunge down toward the rapids that smashed against the stone arches.
She could not move. She could not think. The horse sensed her impotence. Feeling riderless, panicked by the smell of blood, it cannoned across the bridge into Southwark.
The pursuers could not catch it. Bastwick had rewarded Legge well. The gray Arab was a very fast horse.
Part Four
Charity
June 1534–July 1535
31
The New Jerusalem
The wagon behind the nag was piled high with spindly furniture, and it crept across the treeless Westphalian plain like a miniature castle in tow—upended chair legs were its battlements, a standing clock its turret, and a limp linen towel wound around a broomstick its sorry flag.
The afternoon was hot and windless, and the scraggy dray horse plodding at the head of this migrating residence slowed as it approached a bald incline. On the wagon seat, Hermann Deurvorst, master tailor of the city of Amsterdam, clicked his tongue in encouragement to his old mare. Hermann never used the whip. He murmured soft words, and soon the animal grudgingly strained up the low hill. Hermann’s pudgy, sunburned face relaxed into a smile at this proof of the power of persuasion over coercion. For the hundredth time he rejoiced inwardly that he and his wife were moving to a city where, true to Anabaptist doctrine, violence was a thing of the past.
Not like Amsterdam. It had become a perilous place for Anabaptist families like the Deurvorsts. Their belief that infant baptism permanently enslaved the child to the Church, and their insistence that grown men and women be re-baptized, choosing God with adult eyes, had made Catholics and Lutherans alike turn on them savagely. The Emperor Charles had ordered that Anabaptists throughout his domains be drowned. Hermann had heard that at Salzburg three had been thrust alive into a burning house. His wife’s brother had been in Zutphen when several were nailed by their tongues to a pulpit, and Hermann had seen with his own eyes the heads of Anabaptists on long poles spiking the shores near Amsterdam.
He had watched and despaired. Then, one morning he had read a letter, cautiously circulated, from an Anabaptist preacher in Münster. It told of the wonders that had occurred in that city. A group of Anabaptists led by a Dutchman named Matthias—called The Prophet by his followers, the letter said—had won the people’s support over both the Catholic overlords and the rich Lutheran merchants. Christian brothers and sisters in Münster were now free to follow the Inner Word. Equals in the sight of the Lord, they shared all things communally. Violence and enslavement to priests and princes were mere memories of the barbarous Old Ways. In the letter the preacher had invited all believers to join them:
He who seeketh his everlasting salvation, let him forsake all worldly goods, and let him with wife and with children come unto us here to the New Jerusalem.
Hermann had thrilled to the words as if to a call from God himself.
The wagon lumbered up the mound and Hermann turned to the compact, sharp-featured woman on the seat beside him, his wife, Alma. She was squinting at a plume of thick smoke rising straight ahead beyond the hill.
“Of course, she may want to go on,” Hermann said, picking up the conversation with his wife that had been interrupted by the horse’s reluctance. “To Cologne, or Strassburg.”
The couple had been talking, as they often did, about the quiet young Englishwoman who rode behind in the covered part of the wagon. She had arrived on their doorstep a month ago asking for Klaus, their grown-up son. Klaus had once helped fleeing English Protestants settle in Amsterdam, and Hermann discovered from the lady through cautious questioning—he had learned to be very careful when speaking about religion—that she had organized those escapes. A remarkable accomplishment.
“Klaus lives in Deventer now,” Hermann had told her, proud of his son. “He married and moved there a year ago.” Hermann had spoken to the young lady in English, a tongue he had mastered well enough from conversing with the immigrants Klaus used to bring around for a meal; the lady seemed to know only a smattering of Dutch and German.
The news about Klaus had appeared to bewilder her.
“Have you no other friends here?” Hermann had asked, concerned, for she had looked very pale and adrift. But Klaus, it seemed, was the only name she knew in Amsterdam. “I wish I could help you,” Hermann had said, “but my wife and I are just about to leave the city ourselves.”
The young lady had nodded silently and turned away from their door. Hermann and Alma had watched her wander like a lost child into the busy street, a horseman cursing her as she drifted across his path. Alma had run after her, and when the Deurvorsts left Amsterdam they took the young Englishwoman with them.
“But I hope she’ll stay with us,” Hermann said as he watched the horse’s tail swish flies off its bony rump. “I’m afraid she couldn’t look after herself.”
“I’ve told her she’s welcome as long as she wants,” Alma said. “Heaven knows she’s no trouble. She eats almost nothing. And her needlework will fetch good money in Münster. I’ve never seen such fine handiwork as she turns out day and night. Though I’ve told her over and over, ‘Don’t strain your eyes.’ But she says she’s contented working. Poor soul. With a baby coming, too.”
Hermann shrugged philosophically. Both he and his wife had given up trying to encourage the young woman to speak of herself. She sewed in silence and helped Alma with the household tasks without complaint, but she also spent long periods staring into candle flames, and Hermann knew her heart was weighed down with some secret sorrow. “Well, whatever her trials,” he said brightening, “she accepts them with meekness. That pleases God. She’ll be alright.”
His wife nodded, but absently, for she was peering again at the far-off black smoke. It rose in an undisturbed column into the blazing blue sky.
“What could it be?” she muttered. It was too thick to be the smoke of a household chimney, and though they had passed a few stumps of burned-out castles hulking on hillsides, the legacy of the savage Peasant’s War nine years before, they had seen no recent signs of violence. Nor had they heard any reports of trouble. But, then, they heard no news at all, for they passed through villages without stopping, and camped alone; it was the wish of the Prophet Matthias, stated in the letter, that God’s Elect should distance themselves from the heathen world.
The wagon continued to creak up the incline. When it reached the top, Hermann’s eyes widened. He stopped the horse. Alma held her breath at the sight.
“Praise God,” Hermann whispered.
On the plain before them the walls of Münster stood shining under the noonday sun. The black column of smoke rose up from behind the city. A scout was galloping toward them, enveloped in a swirling cloud of white dust.
The young scout led the wagon to the closed western gate, and Hermann and Alma gazed up with open mouths. The city walls were lined with hundreds of people crowding and craning down at them. Some clutched scythes and pitchforks. There seemed to be many more women than men. Despite the large number of people there was an eerie, overwhelming silence.
“Who goes there?” a voice shouted from a tower.
“Brethren from Amsterdam, so they claim,” the scou
t shouted back.
The thousand eyes stared down. No one moved.
The scout, waiting, nervous, whispered to Hermann from the corner of his mouth, “God must be watching over you, Brother. Incredible that the enemy didn’t see you.”
“Enemy?” Hermann asked, astounded. He wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. The scout’s dialect was difficult to follow.
“The Prince-Bishop’s army,” the scout said.
“But we saw no soldiers,” Hermann protested. “We saw no one!”
“I believe you. The question is”—he nodded to the staring multitude on the walls—“will they?”
Someone called out, “Here comes The Prophet!”
The crowd shuffled and parted. A wizened man dressed in gray robes limped to the edge of the wall. His long beard was striped black and gray, his face sour as a crab-apple. At his side walked a lean, handsome young man with yellow hair. He was clothed in sky blue silk, and rings sparkled on his fingers. He was smiling. But the old man glowered down at the wagon as if ready to hurl thunderbolts upon it.
As the throng waited for the Prophet’s response, Honor stepped down from the back of the wagon. She wore a simple white dress of Alma’s, and sunlight glinted off her loosened hair. She looked up at the walls and blinked in the sun’s glare after the gloom of the wagon.
At that moment the pounding of hooves made the thousand watching eyes snap up. A white horse, saddled but riderless, plunged across the mound in the distance behind Honor, then disappeared. The old man on the wall clutched his chest and lurched backwards. “It is a sign!” he croaked. “The Heavenly Father speaks to His Prophet! ‘Behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death.’”
He stared down at the intruders. “The Heavenly Father will have none but the Pure, none but the Elect, in His city!” His skeletal finger homed in on Honor.